Mar 25, 2015

Landsat on AWS

The Landsat program is a joint effort of the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA. First launched in 1972, the Landsat series of satellites has produced the longest, continuous record of Earth’s land surface as seen from space. NASA is in charge of developing remote-sensing instruments and spacecraft, launching the satellites, and validating their performance. USGS develops the associated ground systems, then takes ownership and operates the satellites, as well as managing data reception, archiving, and distribution. Since late 2008, Landsat data have been made available to all users free of charge. Carefully calibrated Landsat imagery provides the U.S. and the world with a long-term, consistent inventory of vitally important global resources.

AWS has made Landsat 8 data freely available on Amazon S3 so that anyone can use our on-demand computing resources to perform analysis and create new products without needing to worry about the cost of storing Landsat data or the time required to download it.

All Landsat 8 scenes from 2015 are available on AWS along with a selection of cloud-free scenes from 2013 and 2014. New Landsat 8 scenes are made available on AWS within hours of production.

Landsat on AWS makes each band of each Landsat scene available as a stand-alone GeoTIFF and the scene’s metadata is hosted as a text file.

The data are organized using a directory structure based on each scene’s path and row. For instance, the files for Landsat scene LC81390452014295LGN00 are available in the following location: s3://landsat-pds/L8/139/045/LC81390452014295LGN00/